I don't get your objections. Cap&trade and carbon taxes are specifically about emissions, not about energy consumption. They seem to match exactly what your want.
I don't see any movements in the EU against energy usage per se; I see a movement against pollution, and against waste of energy (which is essentially a form of pollution).
I'm not sure I understand the OP exactly, but I think I feel similarly. The issue for me is that by improving efficiency without changing the long-term growth curve, you're only buying a few years of reprieve. The fear is that this reprieve that feels effective in the short term might actually be delaying development of a proper solution.
Consider an immediate 50% improvement in fuel efficiency, but with a 10% increase in usage per year. In less than a decade, you are back to where you started, but now the chances of another 50% improvement in efficiency are very low. Worse, the lower cost due to the efficiency improvement may have actually accelerated consumption.
The question is whether the "kick the can" approach will eventually leave you in a position where you can't recover, and whether your efforts would have been better spent on solving the underlying problem of system that depends on limitless growth and the externalization of environmental damage. Unfortunately, it's hard to come up with a "real" solution that doesn't involve massive cutbacks in consumption and/or hard caps on human population.
Ah, thanks, re-reading the previous post in light of yours makes sense (hence the "detour"). I guess I hadn't understood before because I don't see carbon taxes as fitting with that complaint against efficiency - people are free to become more efficient or to keep consuming as much energy, as long as its from non-emitting sources.
It's true that in some areas the EU does mandate efficiency, such as in ICE vehicles. But even there, it's not like they say "you must build N efficient diesel cars", what they're saying is "if you're going to sell diesel cars, they must be efficient".
In summary, I think the sale of efficient cars and such is still a market process. If the EU didn't mandate efficiency, all we would get is inefficient gas guzzlers, not EVs.
Worse, the lower cost due to the efficiency improvement may have actually accelerated consumption.
I don't think so, because the efficiency requirements are accompanied by higher taxes in fossil fuels. At least in my country, the amounts spent on gas monthly hasn't really been dropping, even as cars become more efficient.
At least in my country, the amounts spent on gas monthly hasn't really been dropping, even as cars become more efficient.
I'm not familiar with this area, but I think that in the US retail gasoline prices (that is, including all taxes) have been historically flat. This means that efficiency gains fairly directly to lower operating costs, and hence result in greater demand: "In constant dollar terms, the price of gasoline in 2015 was only seven cents higher than in 1929."
I don't think that fuel taxes have increased much on a constant-dollar per-gallon basis. Considering inflation, the federal rate has in fact dropped significantly: "Since 1993, the US federal gasoline tax has been 18.4¢/gal (4.86¢/L)."
I don't know how the state rates have changed (they are of the same magnitude as the federal rate, ranging from 20-40¢/gal) but my guess would be that they too are historically fairly constant per gallon over the recent decades of efficiency improvements, resulting in an inflation adjusted decrease in the proportion of tax being paid.
It's hard to for me to compare directly because the US standards are expressed as miles/gallon while the EU standards are g CO2/km, but I think the US has about the same standards as the EU, although historically trailing by 5 years or so: http://www.rff.org/files/document/file/RFF-PB-16-03.pdf
But answering the implied general question, yes, the US does have legally mandated efficiency standards for vehicles, and the total number of miles driven is about 3 times what it was in 1970: https://www.afdc.energy.gov/data/10315.
I don't see any movements in the EU against energy usage per se; I see a movement against pollution, and against waste of energy (which is essentially a form of pollution).